Troubleshooting

Stuck? Having a problem? Here are the steps to try before you submit a bug report.

• Make sure Fabric is really the problem. If your problem is in the behavior or output of a remote command, try recreating it without Fabric involved:

  • Run Fabric with --show=debug and look for the run: or sudo: line about the command in question. Try running that exact command, including any /bin/bash wrapper, remotely and see what happens. This may find problems related to the bash or sudo wrappers.

  • Execute the command (both the normal version, and the ‘unwrapped’ version seen via --show=debug) from your local workstation using ssh, e.g.:

    $ ssh -t mytarget "my command"
    

    The -t flag matches Fabric’s default behavior of enabling a PTY remotely. This helps identify apps that behave poorly when run in a non-shell-spawned PTY.

• Enable Paramiko-level debug logging. If your issue is in the lower level Paramiko library, it can help us to see the debug output Paramiko prints. At top level in your fabfile, add the following:

  import logging
  logging.basicConfig(level=logging.DEBUG)
  

  This should start printing Paramiko’s debug statements to your standard error stream. (Feel free to add more logging kwargs to basicConfig() such as filename='/path/to/a/file' if you like.)